An encounter with a cow

Was today Tuesday? What happened to the weekend?

Had trouble sleeping last night and started reading a book called "Bad Chemistry," which I, more or less, finished. So I didn't nod off until very late. Did not really feel sleepy today until about 5. Once I got home, I took a nice long spring nap and got up about an hour ago.

As I headed for lunch today, I encountered a cow racing down the street. My guess is that it wandered off from a stockyard/rail facility nearby. I felt so very sad for this obviously confused and very frightened being. At lunch, some very muddled and very ancient memories surfaced of feeling similiarly sad when a truck hit one of my grandmother's cows. I have no idea when that happened and no sense of events of before or after it. Nor do I have any idea when I last thought of it. Often I've wondered how the brain stores information, memories and emotions. And even more intriguing to me is how those events are accessed. We live our lives in a linear, discrete manner, but we appear to store events in a non-linear fashion. Are today's cow memories and emotions stored next to those of long ago? Is the only link to those past sensations through today's encounter? In a different context, would those same memories appear?

There is a line from Faulkner's "Light in August" that may have relevance here. "Memory believes before knowing remembers."

PAX!